School Site Loss Signals a Big Shift

It was once touted as a state-of-the-art campus designed to bring much-needed relief to one the most crowded school districts in California.

Instead, Santa Ana Unified’s $25-million Lorin Griset Elementary School -- planned for nine acres in the city’s upscale northeast end -- became a debacle that will set back district construction plans by at least two years and add millions in costs.

The school board voted last month to halt the project. Last week, trustees decided to form a committee to declare the now-vacant lot between Flower Street and the Santa Ana Freeway surplus land, a formality so it can be sold.

The plan’s demise represents a victory for its determined opponents, mostly residents of nearby neighborhoods such as Morrison Park and Fisher Park, who fought tirelessly to stop the school and ultimately helped replace two board members.

It also signals a major shift in philosophy for Orange County’s largest school district, where voters passed a $145-million construction bond measure in 1999 to build or expand at least a dozen schools and add rooms for 14,000 students. Nearly four years later, the district has yet to open one new campus.

The battle over Griset was more than about where to build a new school. It was a clash of visions for Santa Ana’s future.

When Griset was proposed a year ago, district trustees and administrators touted the sprawling property as environmentally sound and vacant, a rarity in built-out Santa Ana.

District officials now say the plan was doomed before a single brick was laid. It was, they say, always a less-than-ideal spot for an 850-student campus because it would be in an area of relatively few children and fewer still who attend public schools.

Now those officials want any new school to be built where most students live -- in more densely populated central and southern Santa Ana. Because there are few vacant properties, they likely would have to take over and tear down existing housing through eminent domain, uprooting families if necessary, something anathema to the previous board majority.

That position put past board members at odds with other city leaders who have striven for years to gentrify Santa Ana. City officials argued that by building in denser areas, thus replacing some housing with schools, the district could help relieve overcrowding in the city and in the classrooms.

Trustees said that was tantamount to expelling the poor from the city. Then the school board’s leadership changed, in no small part due to the Griset fight.

Santa Ana’s metaphorical train tracks -- the line that divides the haves and have-nots -- is a commercial stretch of West 17th Street. To the north, towering trees shade vintage homes. Even modest three-bedroom houses go for a half-million dollars.

To the south, families, many of them Mexican immigrants, jam rented tenements, sometimes two or three families in a single apartment. Their children attend Santa Ana’s overcrowded campuses.

The Griset school was proposed for the north side, and the rumblings began almost immediately.

Some residents from north of 17th Street complained that the added traffic and noise would destroy their quality of life. They questioned the wisdom of building a school so close to a freeway -- the pollution would harm the children, some argued. One resident vowed to sue the district and force it to hermetically seal the campus.

At public hearings early last year, opponents and proponents lobbed insults and accused each other of being racists.

Proponents said what critics really minded was that the 61,000-student district is overwhelmingly Latino and mostly poor, and that those children would be roaming upscale streets. There was little opposition, they noted, when the city approved a luxury home project for the same site.

“What we witnessed was a disgusting and unjust racist attack vilifying every homeowner north of 17th Street,” said Dave Hoen, a 52-year-old computer engineer who lives in Morrison Park less than two blocks from the proposed site.

“We felt like we were not wanted in Santa Ana because of the color of our skin,” said Hoen, who is white.

The district bought the land from the developer using eminent domain, and construction was to begin this summer, with classes opening in fall 2004.

To sell the project to the public, the district made several concessions. The new campus would not deplete students from an existing neighborhood school, Santiago Elementary. Nor would Griset be a fundamental campus with open enrollment, drawing students from the entire district. And there would be no busing.

Eventually, Supt. Al Mijares said, district officials realized that the concessions would make it impossible to fill the campus, unless parents ferried their children long distances, which then would create traffic problems in the surrounding neighborhoods.

It would be unfair to parents without cars, he said. “We should have never made concessions.... We should have said, ‘Sorry, but we have an overcrowded school district and we are going to have to bus students in.’ ”

The heated atmosphere made rational discussion difficult, he said. “At that point, highly charged racial things were flying back and forth, and people really dug in.”

The concessions did little to stem the opposition. Hoen and others joined forces with a group of Latino mothers who had begun a recall campaign against trustee Nativo V. Lopez over his support of bilingual education, among other things. They had the blessings of Mayor Miguel A. Pulido and Ron Unz, the millionaire crusader against bilingual education who pumped more than $100,000 into Santa Ana school board races.

Lopez, the firebrand leader of the immigrants’ rights group Hermandad Mexicana Nacional of Santa Ana, was viewed by many as the ideological leader of the school board. Lopez, along with trustees John Palacio, Nadia Maria Davis and Sal Tinajero, often spoke in unison on issues.

Davis, opposed by the recall supporters, lost her bid for reelection in November and was replaced by former trustee Audrey Y. Noji. Lopez was soundly defeated in the February recall election and replaced by Rob Richardson, a past city councilman and former school trustee heavily favored by Griset opponents.

A month later, trustees Richardson, Noji, Tinajero and Rosemarie Avila voted to halt plans for Griset. Palacio was absent and later declined to say how he would have voted.

Lopez decried the decision as a move “to satisfy the well-heeled residents north of 17th.”

“The location is not the absolute ideal,” Lopez agreed. But parents would have found ways to bring their children to the new school, he said.

Lopez said trustees and district administrators had favored Griset but that Mijares switched sides at the last minute in response to political pressure.

“How is it that this area is thought of as almost a gated community that other people can’t take their children to go to school there?” Lopez said. “We are all paying the same taxes.”

Richardson said the move was not meant to appease anyone but to bring reason to the district’s construction plans.

“It sounds almost trite, but it is really about putting schools where they are really needed,” he said. “The board had previously made an error and we are now going to correct it.”

The correction, district officials insist, will be almost painless. A new campus elsewhere in the city could cost as much as $30.5 million, $5 million more than the original campus, and take an extra two years. But they said the district could walk away from the original site at virtually no loss.

The $10 million already spent on Griset and $1 million more to compensate the contractor can be recovered with the sale of the land and state reimbursements, they said. But the reimbursements, estimated at about $4 million, would be deducted from any future district applications for state construction funds.

In an offer unrelated to the future Griset school, the city, whose mayor opposed the original Griset site, offered to vacate a piece of land it leases from the district to house a water tank.

The land is next to Davis Elementary School and could be used to expand that campus, officials said, helping the district save about $2 million. The offer was meant, in part, to ease the financial blow of halting Griset.

The city agreed to tear down the tower and build a pump elsewhere. But the city might have had to tear it down anyway when its lease expired in 2015.

All that is moot, district officials said, because Santa Ana Unified does not have the funds to expand Davis Elementary School.